Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

The Iliad’s list of forces mustered to defend Troy includes the Bronze Age residents of the areas in Asia Minor in which the Greeks later built cities, but it describes them as they were retrospectively visualized in the eighth century. The largest contingent by far is furnished by the Trojans and their immediate neighbors the Dardanians, both of whom share language, culture, religion, and protocols with the Greeks. The Phrygians, Lydians, and Thracians who lived farther away, but also in the northern part of Asia Minor and across the Hellespont, fight for Troy. But the poet of the Iliad carefully includes allies who “speak other tongues” from regions that lay to the south of Troy down the coast—Mysia, Caria, and Lycia—which his audience knew were in their own day heavily populated by Greeks. Listening to the Iliad required them to engage in the act of remembering, or more likely imagining, Asia before the Greeks came. Perhaps, for them, the Greek conquest of Troy, regardless of its historicity, symbolically represented the Ionian forefathers’ arrival on the Asiatic seaboard, during the putatively dark centuries, from the Greek mainland and islands. The ambiguous ethnicity of the Iliadic Trojans themselves, similarly, may have functioned to represent the fusion of cultures, Greek and Asiatic, that had necessarily resulted.